How To Enable The Side-Swipe App Switcher On Non-3D Touch Devices

It’s been more than three months since the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus hit the shelves and jailbreak developers are still finding new ways to reassure owners of older, jailbroken devices that they don’t need to upgrade. As per the current trend of Apple’s annual progression, with the announcement of the latest iPhones, another major update to iOS was released, which came packed with exclusive features for the new generation of iDevices. Much of these are tethered to the new 3D Touch functionality of the 6s duo.

We’ve already seen a bevy of Cydia tweaks that aim to bring these 3D Touch features to the iPhone 6, 6 Plus and other previous-generation devices that are compatible with iOS 9, but it seems the jailbreak community isn’t quite done yet.

New to the Cydia store, SwipeSwitcher is a system tweak that brings 3D Touch-driven multitasking to older devices. iPhone 6s and 6s Plus owners can use the devices’ pressure-sensitive touchscreen to invoke the app switcher from the Home screen or within apps with a hard-press on the left edge of the display. The tweak unlocks this feature on non-3D Touch devices, replacing the hard-press gesture with a simple swipe.

The tweak doesn’t require configuration. Once it is installed, simply swipe inwards from the top-left edge of the screen and let go to invoke the app switcher from anywhere in the OS (other than the lock screen) or continue swiping rightward to quickly switch to the first app in the switcher’s stack. Repeating the latter will return you to the app you were previously using.

We tested the tweak on our jailbroken iPhone 6 Plus and it seemed to work like a charm barring two instances of unexpected resprings while switching between apps. Also, if your device gets performance hiccups every time you launch the app switcher, your experience with SwipeSwitcher might not be as fluid as it should be. Fortunately, there’s a tweak for that as well. If you plan to use this tweak, you might also want to install Switcher Speedster, which reduces app switcher lag by removing the blur effect that appears on the app cards and the background. It even allows you to replace the blur effect on the cards with a progressive fade that looks almost just as good.

SwipeSwitcher is available for free on the CP Digital Darkroom repository at repo.cpdigitaldarkroom.com. This repo isn’t one of Cydia’s defaults, so you’ll have to add it yourself from Sources > Edit > Add.

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